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Daniel Green’s The Reading Experience

The blog, The Reading Experience, is a wonderful place. Daniel Green’s articles are very informed, looking at literary works and literary questions from many perspectives. This is from the “about” page:

I was an academic scholar and critic before I began writing for this blog. I still write the occasional “academic” essay, and my approach to criticism is still no doubt informed by my experience as an academic critic, but I now for the most part write general interest reviews and longer essays intended for a nonspecialist audience.

Currently he looks at Justin Taylor’s The Gospel of Anarchy, considering its reviews before looking closely at the novel:

If The Gospel of Anarchy is not particularly audacious in form or style, Taylor is clearly a skilled enough writer, and the “shifts” in point of view help maintain interest in the story, however much the story is unfortunately all too predictable, the outcome of its depiction of a failed punk commune implicit in its origins in youthful naivete, rigidity of belief, and in the narratives of failed utopias that precede it (I often thought in particular of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance while reading The Gospel of Anarchy.)

In the sidebar of The Reading Experience are links to articles on the web. One fascinating work is Daniel Davis Wood’s Under the Sway of the Cinematic Imagination at his Infinite Patience blog, in which he looks at the “critical oversimplifications” of a piece by John Freeman, editor of Granta, who “attempted both to commemorate the tenth anniversary of “9/11″ and to assess the impact of 9/11 on American literature.” Wood concisely points out Freeman’s misreadings of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955), Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow (1966 and 1973), Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996).